Rachel Robertson
Rachel Robertson is a West Australian writer and senior lecturer in writing at Curtin University. She was the joint winner (with Mark Tredinnick) of the 2008 Calibre Essay Prize. Rachel’s essays and short fiction have been published in many anthologies and journals. She is the author of Reaching One Thousand: A story of love, motherhood and autism (2012, 2018) and co-editor of Purple Prose (2015) and Dangerous Ideas About Mothers (2018).
This collection of strange and spooky stories was perfect reading for that lazy week between Christmas and New Year, providing a dark antidote to the forced cheeriness of the season. The book was inspired partly by The Twilight Zone and similar television shows. Contributors to the anthology were invited to write about the fantastical, uncanny, absurd, or, as editor Angela Meyer notes, ‘even jus ... (read more)
The last decade has seen a significant growth both in the number of motherhood memoirs and in books about autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. Australia is no exception to this trend, and Jo Case, in Boomer & Me, makes a contribution to both fields. As someone who has written a motherhood memoir about autism, I am a sympathetic reviewer but might also be considered too close to the topic. I have ... (read more)
The welcome in the title of this memoir refers both to Goldsworthy welcoming her baby son and to her recognition that her own life has irrevocably changed. The commonplace but also profound shifts resulting from motherhood are gently displayed for the reader, without sentimentality or the relentless self-deprecating irony of many motherhood memoirs and blogs. As readers of her earlier memoir, Pian ... (read more)
Gaining a Sense of Self is the record of Wilson’s first twenty-five years, a story that obviously took great courage to revisit, recreate, and publish. Born in 1942 to a couple whose marriage was already disintegrating, Wilson had a childhood of poverty, hunger, and abuse. Her father, initially absent because of his work in the navy, left the family when Wilson was six years old, and she rarely ... (read more)